NUTRISPEAK by Vesanto Melina
Vancouver’s healthy food festival, Taste of Health, has become a welcome September tradition. It’s a fun, inexpensive way for families to spend a day or weekend. It’s also a great way for vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike to sample healthy foods and discover how small, dietary changes will impact climate...

ON THE GARDEN PATH by Carolyn Herriot
Since the dawn of agriculture, edible plants that thrive in the bioregion in which they grow have been domesticated through plant breeding. Traditionally, local farmers were the stewards of these seeds, passing them on from harvest to harvest. Knowledge garnered over 10,000 years meant farmers were well qualified to select...

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
When you are fully present and people around you manifest unconscious behavior, you won’t feel the need to react to it, so you don’t give it any reality. Your peace is so vast and deep that anything that is not peace disappears into it as if it had never existed. This breaks the karmic cycle of action and...

UNIVERSE WITHIN by Gwen Randall-Young
Love begins at home and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in that action.
– Mother Teresa
Love is a very pure form of energy but when filtered through the prism of ego, it can become distorted and even contaminated. While great harm has been done in the name of love, it had nothing to do with...

documentary screenings at the Vancouver Internationlal Film Festival
FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead
Among the 100 or so documentaries at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (September 25-October 10) is the first-rate Secrecy. The film looks at how, under the auspices of national security, US state secrecy has expanded to the point...

EARTHFUTURE by Guy Dauncey
During August, while most West Coast brains were being gently addled by the sun, beatified by BC bud or transfixed by the Olympics, a heavy-duty development pushed its way into the minds of those of us still working away on the small matter of global warming.
Professor Bob Watson, the UK government’s top climate scientist and...

SCIENCE MATTERS by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola
Are Canadian politicians finally paying serious attention to the environment? Recent events give us reason for optimism. On August 1, we wrote about the federal Sustainable Development Act and how all the political parties put aside their differences to support this important, new law. We’ve also seen a lot...

by Drew Noftle
In 2005, I was living a luxurious life in Beijing, China, as the private English teacher for Yang Kaisheng, then President of the Industrial Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world. I was also a corporate trainer for various multinational corporations. Like many people, I believed 9/11 was about America getting blowback from...

by Celia Brauer
I will never forget my first encounter with “real” salmon. It was the late ‘70s and I had just begun a new life in Victoria. Summer turned to fall and the locals were suddenly discussing the return of the salmon to the local streams. As an urban easterner, I was accustomed to getting my salmon from a tin can, not a stream, and...

by Don Ollsin
The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions. – George Orwell
My first herb walk was with a four-year-old on a farm in California. He led my wife and me on a walk and showed us about 20 plants. Because this child lived with these plants, he knew them intimately; this is the way it was traditionally.
I like the...

DRUG BUST Alan Cassels
Seek and ye shall find. We can find disease wherever we look; the question is do we need to be looking? One of the longest-running debates in health care circles involves the dichotomy of “prevention” versus “treatment.” Some people complain that our “health” system has nothing to do with health and...

by Joseph Roberts
“This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
– Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Conservative government launched a huge AMEND Bill 51 campaign in the wake of the hostile reception it received. People are now in place, hired by tax-payers dollars, to...

by Geoff Olson
In a 2000 interview on CBC Radio’s Ideas, ethnobotanist Wade Davis recalled a “horrific book that came out called The Secret Life of Plants.” One of Davis’ plant-gathering colleagues, Tim Ploughman, was “infuriated” with the book’s thesis that houseplants respond emotionally to human voices and the...